Many local investigations and prosecutions, over the course of many years, have failed to stem the riptide of political scandal that seems always to batter at San Bernardino. State probes have failed as well. Now the FBI is here, which means our stink is offending nostrils on a national level. But is there any realistic hope that good will come of this investigation either? Could even an international police force prevail here? There have to be doubts.

One begins to wonder, in fact, if the forces of evil at work in San Bernardino are of an other-worldly nature.

My sarcastic column of a week ago, after the FBI raided San Bernardino International Airport to investigate how public money has been spent there, prompted a note from reader Steven Harbauer, a former longtime resident of San Bernardino who now lives in Riverside.

He asked me, “Why is San Bernardino like this? As far back as I can remember, including kindergarten, San Bernardino has been an armpit. There seems to be a lot of concentrated evil. You just don’t feel safe. What the heck is it? Demographics really? Or some kind of curse? Your piece would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad (and true).”

What is my answer to his question? Why indeed is San Bernardino the way it is?

Right now, as weary as I have become, I am going with this one:

The city is cursed.

I mean, I couldn’t help but note the irony in the fact that last week, even as we recoiled from the sting of the FBI raid (and it was the fourth time this year that the feds have conducted sweeps here in separate probes of a variety of city and county corruption cases), we also watched Congregation Emanu El, the stalwart Jewish community that had been a fixture in San Bernardino since pioneer days, breaking ground on a new permanent headquarters in Redlands.

For more than 150 years the congregation weathered the storms of San Bernardino, but in 2009 it decided it had seen enough, and it was time to move.

As I wrote at the time, a Jewish exodus away from a place is a question-raising event of biblical proportions, and it calls for much soul-searching for those left behind. If soul-searching still is possible.

There are many accounts in literature and lore of accursed communities. There’s the well-known Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example. Greek myth tells of a curse visited upon the city of Thebes. In the folklore of early America there is the cursed village of Dudleytown, Conn. And Clint Eastwood saves a cursed town in not one but two movies, “High Plains Drifter” (1973) and “Pale Rider” (1985).

The story of San Bernardino can rival any of the others. The city was established in 1851 by a band of pious Mormon colonists from Salt Lake City who felt called by God to settle here.

All was well until October 1857, barely six years later, when the Mormons were abruptly recalled to Utah by the church’s leadership. San Bernardino was thrown into chaos. Those Mormons who obeyed the order, and it was more than half the city’s population, were obliged to hastily sell their homes and lands at sacrificial prices. Opportunists and scavengers, who were more and more in abundance in those frontier days, moved in to take advantage. They joined with the “apostate” Mormons who chose to stay, in defiance of their church, to form a volatile new population.

In almost no time, San Bernardino became a Wild West town of the most rip-roaring variety. Henry Boyle, a Mormon who visited in December 1857, just two months after the recall, reported with alarm that the colony had become a “den of Apostates, thieves, gamblers, drunkards, Methodists and every kind of foul Character.”

Throughout the 1860s, San Bernardino crawled with gunslingers, swindlers, secessionists and anarchists. There were riots and gunfights in the streets. There were lynch mobs and public hangings. The intersection of Third and D streets was called Whiskey Point because there were saloons on all four corners. Chinatown, near today’s Meadowbrook Park, was full of opium parlors and gambling pits.

San Bernardino’s volunteer police force disbanded in 1862. And nobody wanted the job of San Bernardino County Sheriff, either. Seven men served short stints between the years 1860 and 1863.

During the American Civil War years of that decade, the Union Army became convinced that the lawless populace of San Bernardino represented a greater threat even than hostile Indians to its Western supply routes. It dispatched four companies of the 4th Infantry to keep an eye on San Bernardino. When those troops came under incessant sniper fire, two dragoon companies were sent as backup.

Years later, in the 1940s, as the United States prepared to enter World War II, the federal government again felt it necessary to intervene in San Bernardino. Fearful that the city’s notorious red-light district was proving too great a distraction for the thousands of servicemen at surrounding military bases, the Pentagon threatened to quarantine San Bernardino unless the city cleaned up its act.

Today, the city once again is causing alarm for the United States government, which has dispatched its agents on four separate occasions this year to determine what is amiss here.

All those other stories of accursed communities end either with their destruction at the hand of wrathful providence or in the appearance of a hero who manages, against all odds, to save the day.

What does fate hold in store for San Bernardino? We don’t yet know. The story still is unfolding.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but destruction isn’t my first choice. I say we look for a hero.

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